Icebound Page 2

  We stopped the external bleeding with pressure and a few sutures. He was hyperventilated on a respirator to decrease intracranial pressure.

  We could find no other injuries but we left the cervical collar on until his spine could be x-rayed. He was quickly stabilized and sent to CAT scan with the neurosurgeon. Now it was time to talk to his family.

  This was always the hardest part. I preferred to have the family at the bedside, if they wished, during serious cases like this. Not knowing and forever wondering if something else could be done is so much worse for a loving family than being present while decisions were being made. They would know how the team fought for the life, how well we did our job, how hopeless or hopeful the situation was. But in this case, the family arrived too late to be with me in the trauma room.

  The look on your face and the way you walk in prepares them for the news. As I sat down and introduced myself, I kept the look of disbelief that I felt, to see a young man in his prime try to take his own life. I often say that you can’t be a good ER doc until you’ve had a stare-down with the devil and lost. The job puts you in the position of sharing people’s darkest hours, their greatest fears and terrible shames.

  “It’s bad,” I said, letting it sink in, allowing them see it in my eyes. “He is still alive but I don’t know if he will survive, and if he does, how the rest of his life will be.” Pause. “Do you want to see him now?”

  Just then a nurse walked in and whispered, “Doc, you’d better come to Room Four, stat.” I nodded and stood up. I told the family I was needed to attend another emergency, but assured them that the neurosurgeon would do everything she could and would be able to answer their questions. They could speak to me again if they wanted.

  But I knew the man would go to surgery and I would never know his story, probably never know his fate.

  The charts were piling up again at the nurses’ station, and the show still had to go on.

  The sun was coming up over the farms and rolling fields of eastern Ohio as I drove home from the hospital. Home—what a concept. I was forty-six years old and living in my parents’ house, sleeping in a bedroom decorated with the ruffled curtains and daisy wallpaper of my teenage years. I parked the Volvo in the gravel drive and breathed deeply to banish the lingering smell of blood and disinfectant from my lungs. The autumn air was already touched with winter. The leaves in the canopy of maples and beech trees over the driveway were just starting to turn.

  This was not the place where I grew up—that was a ranch house in the country a few miles away. This was the house made of the dreams and quirks of the Cahill family in its boisterous prime. My father, Phil, was a master builder. He had taught my two younger brothers, Scott and Eric, his trade while constructing this house. We had built the house, stone by stone, deep in a rugged forest, with big picture windows on all sides. Every cupboard, each tile, the doorways, the rocks in the massive fireplace, all had been placed there by a close relative. The paneling in the hall came from a barn that I had helped to tear down. The slate roof was scavenged from an old farmhouse. I remember sitting tied to the roof of the three-story gothic building, ripping off slate and sending it down in a box to the girl whom Eric would one day marry. My mother, Lorine, had started college when I was twelve and became a psychologist. She decorated the house with found objects and treasures bought at flea markets and estate sales.

  We have always been a close-knit clan, and the house was our monument to ourselves, a shrine to loyalty and love and good hard work. I will always think of it as my mother’s house, as her spirit pervades it, but it has my father’s soul in its strong foundation and solid frame. It was the obvious refuge for me when everything else in my life fell apart.

  This morning, as always, my mother had carefully stacked my mail on the kitchen table. As I made myself some tea I absently fanned through the pile of bills and journals and then started to read.

  The back pages of The Annals of Emergency Medicine usually carried ads for job openings in the medical field, and that was where I was looking when some display type caught my eye: POLAR medicine. PHYSICIANS NEEDED FOR U.S. ANTARCTIC PROGRAM.

  The job called for a full year of work at one of the three American bases in Antarctica. Half of the time would be spent in the isolation and darkness of the austral winter. I felt a prickling sensation up and down my skin, like the kind of physical excitement a child feels at the sight of a bicycle under the Christmas tree. I read the words over and over again, and my pounding heart told me this was what I had been looking for without knowing it.

  I believe in geographic cures—they allow you to throw all your cards in the air and see where they land, then pick them back up and deal them again. I was ready for a new deal. I had stayed in a terrible, suffocating marriage for twentythree years and lost everything by the time I saw that losing was inevitable. In the end, I lost my selfrespect, almost lost hope. Like an animal in a leghold trap, I gnawed away at parts of myself to escape. I survived, got a divorce, but I lost my three children in the process. And that is something that still seems impossible to me.

  You would think that as an ER doctor I would recognize the signs of abuse in my own marriage, but I am here to tell you that I did not. I could take a woman’s history in the examination room, run through the clinical checklist, explain to her that emotional and psychological abuse are another form of battery, and understand, on a rational and detached level, that it can happen to anyone. But like so many women, I couldn’t see it happening to me. It is difficult to explain, and painful to talk about the raw, private matters within a family. But since I have chosen to tell you about my journey to the South Pole, and the community of friends and strangers who rescued me, I need to tell you something about my life and why I made the choices that brought me there.

  I grew up believing anything is possible if you just work hard enough to get it. I remember most of my childhood as sun-splashed and magical, full of friends and freedom and adventures. I was given the name Jerri Lin Cahill, but from the time I was learning to talk, I was known as Duffy, or Duff, for short. It had something to do with the first sounds I made: duff-duff, duff-ree. The nickname caught on. It was Irish, sporty, lively, and it suited me well.

  My brother Scott was two years younger than I, and Eric was born four years later. Scott and I sat in the hospital parking lot on that cold February night with our aunt Mona and saw the aurora borealis in the Ohio sky for the first time. When Mr. Baby came home (that’s what we called him then, and still do) he was placed in my bedroom and I moved into Scott’s room. Dad had built matching beds for us. As soon as we were roommates, Scott and I started to imagine things together.

  We were pirates on the high seas. There were alligators under the beds and witches in the closets. He would chase after them with a baseball bat, screaming, “Get out of there, you dirty thieves!” Forty years later, he would spin wonderful fantasies for me when I was trapped at the South Pole, to help give me the strength to survive.

  As a child I spent a lot of time looking after the boys, or trying to, but it never slowed me down. We lived at the end of a dirt road, surrounded by dairy farms, next door to a family with seven kids. We ran in a pack all summer long, making our own fun. We would play in bogs full of wild roses and in abandoned farms, where we made up elaborate games. We built huts in the forest and dug deep holes and tunnels to hide in. We waded barefoot in the swamps, catching snapping turtles and making dams.

  As my brothers got older life became more dangerous. They liked to blow things up. One day Scott made a rocket and attached it to his bike.

  All the neighborhood kids watched as the first boy from Salem, Ohio, launched himself into space. We never worried about how he would come down. Of course, all we got to see was his pants on fire. Another time, I was upstairs and heard a terrible boom. I ran to the basement to find Scott with his arms outstretched and his eyes closed. He said, “Just pick the glass out of me.” He had taken a sledgehammer to an old TV tube to see if it would explode or implode.

  Even as a baby, Eric was always climbing to the top of trees and getting stuck. I would spend hours trying to get him down safely.

  After many unsuccessful attempts, I’d call for Mom, who would simply demand that he come down, and down he would come.

  Scott never stopped trying to reach the stars, while Eric grew into the strong, rational one in the family. Eric became an engineer with great lifelong friends and a stable, loving marriage to Diana— nicknamed Dee Dee—whom he had met at age fourteen. While I was in Antarctica, Eric wrote me detailed, reasonable instructions to help me keep things in perspective. Scott lived life with the throttle wide open. He married and divorced several times, gained and lost as many fortunes over the years, and never looked back. I would think, “I have two brothers; one is a rock and one is the wind.”

  I was a good student and a natural athlete, with phenomenal balance and strength. I spent much of my girlhood upside down. At age five, I asked for gymnastics lessons. There are scratchy home movies of me as a child, tumbling in the front yard and standing on my hands and falling again and again until I got it right. Gymnastics taught me to push myself to my limits, and how to train my body to act reflexively, without thought. I would practice acrobatics for hours after school, and then read my homework standing on my hands against the wall. Eventually I could depend on my body to do anything. I could hang by one hand from a railroad trestle and not be afraid, because I knew I could pull myself up. This impressed the boys in my life. In fact Bill, my high school boyfriend, once told me he liked me so much because I was “the only girl who would jump into the river from the railroad bridge”!

  Bill had an MG Midget convertible. We spent so many evenings riding around in that car listening to sixties music with the wind in our hair. It felt like we were flying in an open airplane. I loved to go fast, whether it was upside down and backwards, off a balance beam, or riding my bike endlessly to nowhere. It was on my bike or on a trampoline that I dreamed, and where I first decided to go to exotic places like Africa and Antarctica when I grew up. I was disappointed that the world had become so civilized, and I was determined to find the frontier, even if it meant going to the moon.

  I owe my curiosity about the world to my mother, who was a most unusual role model, a woman ahead of her time. She had—and still has—a brilliant mind, and she always wanted to be a doctor, not really an option for middle-class girls in thel940s. She settled for nursing school instead. She was only eighteen when she met my father and fell in love. I was born a year after they were married. My mother dropped out of school to raise the children, but she was never a typical housewife.

  She fascinated us all. She would talk about science and nature instead of telling us fairy tales. We discussed everything: politics, religion, history. She would talk while I helped her clean the house or chop vegetables. She’d hand me a stack of laundry to fold and say, “Let’s talk about justice.” She wrote poetry and read poems to us and had poets come to our home.

  Once Mom went to college, things got even more interesting. She would often bring home people from different countries for us to meet. I remember a Sikh who removed his turban to show us his long black hair. She would take us into the warehouse district of Cleveland to visit a Buddhist temple on Buddha’s birthday. Above all she was a scientist, and also a real character, one who loved life and wanted to experience it. She encouraged us to do the same.

  My mother’s heritage is German Swiss, and a strong Teutonic streak runs though her. While she embraced life, she also saw it as a duty. Heavy lines were drawn between right and wrong. She taught us a harsh code to live by: One never shows weakness to colleagues who need you to be strong. A strong person must take care of the weak.

  “Death before dishonor” was one of her maxims. She would rather see us die than live as cowards, not have served our people, not have done our duty. We were raised to charge the hill, never to look back except to pick up our fallen comrades and save them before taking the bullet, gladly, ourselves.

  There were many other aphorisms in my mother’s arsenal of beliefs: “When you are the hammer, strike; when you are the anvil, bear” was a favorite. Another, which I have laminated and always keep with me in a little sack with my daily medical equipment says: “To whom much is given, much is expected.”

  Dad, on the other hand, saw his life as gravy. Phil Cahill had been born poor and lived through the Depression, so all that he accomplished was a pleasant surprise. He was of Irish and English descent, and he understood the magic of the Irish—or pretended to. When he found a parking spot right in front of the restaurant where we had a reservation, he would say it was the charm of “the little people.” He was a very lucky man because he thought himself, during a very hard life, to be very fortunate. Of course he made that good fortune with a lifetime of labor. Like my mother, he believed that you measured a person by how hard he worked.

  Mom always claimed that Dad was the risk-taker in the family, but we called him “Look-Out Cahill” behind his back—because he was always warning us to be careful. His caution was earned by experience.

  Dad had always been in a risky business, first as a carpenter, then as the owner of a construction company. As a young man in demolition, buildings had literally fallen around him. He always made us think about our escape routes. In unfamiliar buildings he would ask, “How will you get out?” This served me well in a hotel fire years later.

  I was pregnant, in a leg cast, and carrying a two-year-old, yet I was the second person out of the darkened building because on the way in I had instinctively counted the doors to the exit stairway.

  Once I tried to take my father to what I thought was a nice restaurant, but he wouldn’t eat there, insisting that the structure could collapse at any moment. We ate across the street. A few months later, I called Mom to tell her that the restaurant had collapsed in the night, and she should tell Dad that he had been right. She said, “Please, don’t encourage him.”

  I always thought my mother had a wonderful, wicked sense of humor. Even though we didn’t have the money for such things, she once bought an octopus at the supermarket because she had never seen one available before and wanted her children to experience it. We each took it to school in turn in a glass jar. Then, to get the full use of it, she put the octopus in my dad’s bathwater. Mom always drew him a bath to warm him up after he’d worked outside on cold winter days.

  This time she added bubble bath. We all waited outside the bathroom door in gleeful anticipation. When we heard Dad yell, we ran giggling down the hallway. He was half-amused and half-irritated, and it seemed that the octopus joke had run its course. The next morning, however, when Dad went to use the bathroom, we heard him shout, “Lorine!” The octopus was in the toilet. After that, we certainly couldn’t eat the octopus, so we dissected it. (Mom was always bringing us things to dissect, like cows’ eyes and hearts from the butcher.) A career in medicine seemed a natural choice for me. I think I was always a healer. I was the sort of child who nursed wounded birds and frogs I found in the woods. The other kids always ran to me when they were afraid or hurt. I couldn’t stand to see another child in pain, or left out, or humiliated, because I felt their suffering with them. Some call it empathy or hypersensitivity, but I believe I was born with thinner membranes than most people, and a heightened awareness. This has been a blessing and a curse. As a doctor, I can quickly absorb a tremendous amount of information, both physical and emotional, from a patient. But as a child, I felt too much: I was too alert, too sensitive to changes in my environment, easily startled by loud noises and upset by anger or grief.

  Like my father, Look-Out Cahill, I often found myself imagining worst-case scenarios. My emotions ran close to the surface. Sometimes I sat in class, unable to stop the tears running down my face while I waited to be called for a spelling bee. (I am still a terrible speller.) I would see a speeding car and forecast the crash in all its horrific details.

  I couldn’t stand the sight of blood and would run in terror if I found a dead animal, hit by a car, on the side of the road.

  These anxieties were a serious inconvenience for someone in a family that valued strength and disdained weakness, not to mention a mother who brought home cattle parts to dissect. I coped by learning to control my perceptions, and consequently, my emotions. Just as I had trained my body to reflexively perform gymnastic routines, I trained my mind to deflect disturbing thoughts and images. I practiced imagining that things were the opposite of what they seemed: “The sky is not gloomy because it is dark,” I would think. “It just seems dark. It is really full of light, it is beautiful, and everything is okay.” I would test myself constantly, forcing myself to confront my fears, and learned not to be afraid.

  I began saving lives at a young age. I can’t remember how many people I have fished out of the water. Scott and I were twelve and ten when I did my first rescue. Everyone in the family was a strong swimmer, and we lived in the water all summer long. One day a young boy had swum too far out into a lake. When we saw that he was in trouble we raced out to help him. He nearly drowned us when we tried to pull him to shore. We had not yet taken lifeguard lessons, so we made up our own plan. I would go underwater and hold him up by the body so he couldn’t fight, while Scott surfaced and shouted for help. Then Scott went under and held the boy’s face above water while I shouted for help. When the official lifeguard finally noticed us, we got in trouble for interfering, but I know we saved that child’s life. I was hooked.

  I was a cheerleader in high school, a track star, and a scholar. I spent my senior year abroad, as an exchange student in Sweden. Suffice it to say that being a seventeen-year-old girl sprung from Ohio into the Europe of 1969 was a mind-bending experience. Like many kids my age, I was also drawn to the civil rights and human rights movements, and I was determined to change the world.